Friday, April 03, 2009

In fact you can go to a whole bunch of them, as it is First Fridays and the Dupont Circle area galleries are having their openings and extended hours.

While there make sure that you check out the Caos on F Street gallery collective to see David Harp: Photography, Michael Berman: Mixed Media and Matthew Falls: Furniture.

Also "A Cast of Characters" - A survey of kiln cast and lamp worked glass as seen by the instructors and studio artists of the Washington Glass School. Reception tonight, Friday, April 3, from 6 to 8 pm at Foundry Gallery (1314 18th Street, N.W., 1st Floor, between Massachusetts and N Streets, just off Dupont Circle).

"Space, Unlimited" shows us just how terrifying it is to be an artist right now.

In nearly all the show's pieces -- and there is one self-assured exception -- we sense a waking terror at the long shadow of art history. With so many Titians and Mondrians behind us, how to carve the road forward? Beat them or join them?

Read Jessica's review here and then go to the lecture by my good friend and co-curator Laura Roulet on Sunday, April 5 starting at 3PM at the Art Museum of the Americas, located at 201 18th Street, NW in DC.

Here’s a cure for cabin fever: a recession-priced escape to Manhattan.

Look for a discount fare on the Amtrak Acela (tip: board the no-cellphone “Quiet Car”). Rate-surf for the New Yorker Hotel, an architectural classic one block from Penn Station. It completed a massive renovation in time for the economic bust, so you can get a bargain and colossal views. Next, buy a $74 CityPass that gets you VIP admission at a bunch of iconic venues, and a $7.50 FunPass for 24 hours of unlimited subway riding on days you don’t feel like walking, although walking’s easy from this central location.

Now, some quick takes from my long weekend of art-spotting.

Big venues are scrambling more than ever to lure more visitors. The Metropolitan Museum of Art hit the bell with its new “It’s Time We Met” ad campaign built on photos submitted by museum-goers. Winners got a couple hundred bucks and an annual pass. So if you dream of having work shown at the Met, instead of slaving over a hot canvas just click some whimsical scenes with your cellphone.

So I shouldn’t have been surprised when security sentry Guy Anglade told me that visitors have asked which way to the “We Met at the Met” exhibition. Anglade shook his head: “Forget Carravaggio, where are the Flickr photos?”

"Six-year-old emulating Edward Hopper! His own choice, said his mother."By Robin Tierney

The supersized images are plastered on billboards, buses and fencing in front of the museum. Evidently in the social media age, there’s an unquenchable thirst for acts of cuteness executed against fine art. Imagine your life’s work functioning as a background for goof-shots.

One special exhibition revisited the debate that won’t die: “is photography art?” “Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard” arrested scores of onlookers during my visit with its documents of Americana arcana culled from the photographer’s collection of 9,000 postcards. For most of the cards, the photographers remain unknown, but several of Walker’s own postcard creations are on view. Through his 1936 experiments, he taught himself to crop for maximum clarity and intensity. Walker then worked decades to free this humble genre from the pigeon-hole of nostalgia and get respect as an art form.

Whatever you call them, their allure overpowers: viewers studied b&w and hand-colored portraits of beach towns, main streets, train depots, river ports, windswept cliffs, hometown jubilees, fan-dancers, sanitarium patients. The alchemy of documentary and lyricism includes original Coney Island amusements (“Atlantis, the Sunken City”), San Francisco’s Valencia Hotel vaulted out into the street by an earthquake, even an electric chair at Sing Sing prison.

Across the hall, I caught the final day of “Reality Check: Truth and Illusion in Contemporary Photography.” Interesting selections included faux-to-journalist David Levinthal’s staged battle using toy soldiers, flour and plastic bags shot using a very narrow depth of field. Mark Wyse documents a squirrel ignored in the road after falling to his death in his “Marks of Indifference” series.

Downstairs, “Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors” offered an opportunity to observe the graphic shorthand of dots, dashes, loops, spirals and zigzags the modernist used to record images and to compose paintings.

Make time to meander in Central Park.

Just south of the park you can overdose on eccentricities all day at MoMA (AKA the Museum of Modern Art). Sleep-deprived, I lacked the patience to mine for meaning in the temporary exhibitions that left me plagued by an earworm of “You Gotta Have a Gimmick” (from “Gypsy”). Such as Klara Liden’s projects, partly due to the medium designation of “interventions.” And a performance artist’s self-imposed year-long confinement to a cell. “Four Decades of Contemporary Art” felt like a Target commercial on drugs.

The ennui evaporated once I remembered to fetch my MoMA audio tour.

It’s worth scaling the steps for the survey spotlighting Martin Kippenberger, who has lambasted the vagaries of modern culture in nearly every medium. Consider “Psycho buildings” and the sprawling recession-ready installation presenting job interview as sporting event, complete with bleachers and cheerleaders.

MoMA admission gets you a free all-day ticket to use when you wish at P.S.1, the contemporary/indie art haven two subway stops east in Queens.

Jonathan Horowitz commanded a bunch of spaces with jarring works in a range of media. Player piano playing songs from the Who’s “Tommy” paired with disturbing clips from “The Miracle Worker” and other movies. Commentary amusing and sinister about politics and celebrity, the universal appeal of violence and scandal, and imperialism as foreign policy and entertainment from the Roman Empire onward. It’s interesting. Really.

Watching Yael Bartana’s videos of vehicles eerily coming to a stop on a dark highway made me contemplate the narcotic effect of film, especially after I nodded off for an uncertain duration until a lady guard told me it was closing time.